A guest post from the always-smart Noah Gibbs.
"Youtube Smart"
Any form of communication when transmitted or recorded, cuts out important parts of the experience. Audio, video, Skype, SMS...
This has always been true. We say "book smart" to describe the specific ways in books impoverish the learning experience - "book smart" opposes "street smart" because of the things you learn on the street but never from books.
As we learn more of these modern communications, we will discover how they impoverish our learning experiences, each in their separate ways.
A generation will grow up on Khan Academy and they will *not* be book-smart. We have designed Khan Academy with involved grading -- with many examples to work through. We did it to *prevent* the blindness of "book smartness."
Instead, our Khan Academy generation will have its own blindess. A generation from now, we will know what "Khan Academy Smart" looks like. It will not be "book smart". I imagine nothing will be called "Youtube-smart." But there won't be just one.
We are learning what SMS-smart means even now, as teenagers form and reform their
own societies. I look forward to meeting our Skype-smart, Khan-Academy-smart and Scratch-smart
descendants. As with our book-smart forebears, that very blindness will bring more to us than it takes away.
Would you like to be less blind? The old advice still applies. If you don't want to just be book-smart, get book-smart *and* street-smart. If you don't want to just be Youtube-smart, get out of your comfort zone. Go find out what SMS-smart teenagers do well -- and if you think the answer is "nothing," you're not listening. Fix that first.
Fifteen different societies surround you, usually before breakfast. More if you're in California or New York. The internet and fast travel have brought them to your door.
It'd be a shame to waste that, wouldn't it?
Noah Gibbs writes about ruby programming at "http://codefol.io" -- he occasionally gets off track and writes about anything and everything else. But don't we all have our bad habits?